the America I love.

In a time when world events focus us on the negative, I am lucky to be reminded of another America. More than three years after I first arrived on a beautiful clear day in Oakland I remember

the warmth of the northern Californian indian summer with its still, clear mornings and hot, sunny afternoons

the beauty of a winter sunset over the San Francisco Bay, filling one of the largest expanses of sky I have ever seen

a natural beauty unlike anything I have ever seen or could imagine. Of giant trees, stunning mountain ranges and rugged coastlines.

“In wildness lies the salvation of the earth” – Henry Thoreau

and most of all the people who ignored my prejudices and invited me into their lives, in the process teaching me that so many of us on the other side are as wrong as those we scorn. Of all those people one stands out above the rest, consuming both my head and my heart.

e, you say you are amazed to meet another person so alive as me but you forget much of what it is that makes me that way.

It’s you.